Lore Dump On My Magic System:

Lore dump on my Magic System:

Alright yeah time to lore dump about my magic system. So basically, it's a bit of a mix of biology, psychology. Magic lets you do anything that YOU believe you can do. As long as you can imagine it, and believe it to be real, it will be real. Massive explosions or subtle shifts in energy can happen as fast as thought. However, there are a few limitations, and that's mostly where the science part comes in. Energy is drained from your body's cells whenever you do magic, and the amount drained is directly related to the task you preformed. At First it draws energy from the fat stored in your body, but if you were casting a really powerful fucking spell, then it just keeps pulling the chemical energy from your cells until all that's left of you is a pile of dust.

Changing the energy's form into things like heat or light are easy, turning energy into matter is much harder, and altering the energy withing living things is the most difficult. People who are smarter than me would probably pick up on the fact that the system wouldn't allow you to do too much in a short time, despite the fact that you can alter reality as quick as you can think. Your body only has so much energy in it, and at best you'd be able to do three D&D style cantrips before burning yourself out. So luckily, there are a couple in-universe work arounds that make the impossible possible.

The main one is your standard focus, you know, magically pouring your energy into an inorganic object for later use. It can be a long process, but it's the cleanest way to build power for more complex casts. Over in the west they rely on catalyst to cast spells, sacrificing something of cultural importance such as blood or a specific flower, then drawing the energy out of the scraps in order to cut down on the cost of certain effects. There are also a few spells that require certain actions or special items in order to work. An easy example would be an effigy of a person that you must make yourself in order to use tracking magic on someone. Limitations like these have been put in place after centuries of collective belief and can differ from group to group.

There's also a strange side effect, a phenomenon that has stumped the world's best scholars. Seemingly randomly, an invisible force will carve a rune into your body after you've used magic. As these marks begin to form, most people describe feeling a cold pressure, as if frozen hands were pressing into their flesh. But once the carving finishes, the resulting carving always radiates a feeling of warmth, no matter how cold the surrounding air may be. Terrible mages have ended up with intricate patterns, while one of the best mages in history only ever got strange holes that shot through her body. Most cultures treat the carvings as a status symbol, the more marks, the stronger the mage.